Rogue Trader

by Andy Hoare

  Though the warning klaxons still howled their doom-laden song, Sarik judged that it was time to get moving. As the Titans passed the midway point of the churning river, he opened the vox-net to order his units forward. ‘All commands, Predators forward. Column, advance.’

  As his driver gunned the Rhino forwards, Sarik hauled open the hatch above his head and took position at the cupola’s storm bolter. In the open, the Titans’ klaxons were all but deafening, drowning out the roar of the Space Marines’ armoured vehicles. The Titans passed the middle of the river, huge bubbles and gouts of steam churning from the waters all around. Then the air was filled with multiple howling shrieks as the Apocalypse launchers atop each Reaver’s carapace shell unleashed a salvo into the settlement. So dense was the smoke enveloping the shore Sarik could not see their targets, but the Titans were gifted with arcane sensorium systems capable of detecting a target in the most adverse of conditions. With each salvo, distant buildings erupted in seething explosions and defenders died by the score.

  Sarik’s Rhino rolled forwards, picking up speed as it cleared the end of the bridge, a dozen others, as well as Predators, Whirlwinds, Dreadnoughts and land speeders, following close behind. Sarik ordered the grav-attack speeders to range forwards, to scour the ruins for any sign of surviving tau, while the vehicle column formed up into an advance pattern before plunging into the ruins.

  ‘All squad leaders,’ Sarik said into the vox-net. ‘We need to get clear so the main body can cross the bridge. Spread out as soon as you are across.’

  There was a brief pause, then Sergeant Lahmas of the Scythes of the Emperor came on the channel. ‘Brother-sergeant,’ Lahmas said. ‘I’m at the rear. I have no visual contact with following forces, over.’

  ‘What?’ Sarik said as he turned in his cupola towards the column’s rear. Through banks of drifting smoke and dust he could just about make out Lahmas’s carrier at the far end of the bridge, but virtually nothing beyond it for the smoke was too thick.

  ‘Confirmed, brother-sergeant,’ the pilot of one of the circling land speeders reported. Sarik glanced up and located the speeder. ‘I have visual contact on the approach. There are no Imperial forces visible at all, over.’

  ‘Where the hell are they…?’ Sarik growled. If the army did not cross River 992 at Erinia Beta and take Gel’bryn before Grand’s ultimatum expired, they would all be dead.

  Several kilometres east of Sarik’s position, Lucian pushed his way through a crowded regimental muster. Grumbling Chimeras filled the air with acrid exhaust fumes and the shouts of hundreds of Imperial Guardsmen assaulted his ears. Hospitaller staff in a hastily erected medicae station did their best to succour scores of wounded troopers, and winding processions of Ministorum preachers threaded their way through the masses, dispensing the Emperor’s blessings to all and sundry. Haphazardly parked armoured vehicles and knots of exhausted troopers spread out across a wide expanse of land, and evidently, they were going nowhere in a hurry.

  By the time Lucian had located Colonel Armak, the commander of the Brimlock 2nd Armoured and brevet-general of the ground force, Gurney’s transmissions had abruptly cut out. The cardinal’s vox-servitor had been discovered and deactivated, and the Imperial Guard’s command channels were finally clear of the incessant phono-looped sermons.

  ‘Why aren’t you moving?’ Lucian bellowed as he crashed the colonel’s orders group. Armak and his subordinates were clustered around the flank of the colonel’s command tank, a huge map suspended from its side. A dozen heads turned towards him as he approached.

  ‘I said–’

  ‘Lord Gerrit,’ the colonel interrupted, removing his peaked cap with one hand and sweeping back his stark white, sweat-plastered hair with the other. ‘It’s a miracle we’re here at all and the entire army isn’t hightailing it for Sector Zero. You were saying?’

  Lucian forced his way into the throng of commanders and aides, coming to stand in front of the colonel. ‘Good answer, colonel,’ he grinned. ‘But we need to get this force moving again, or we’re all f–’

  ‘Thank you for your astute observation, Lord Gerrit,’ Colonel Armak said, a wry smile touching his lips. The distant roar of a Titan’s gatling cannon thundered across the land from the south, and Armak continued. ‘This is a mess, Gerrit, but I’d appreciate your input.’

  ‘Well enough,’ Lucian replied, coming to stand by the tactical map hanging from the command tank’s side. He consulted his chrono, then looked to the map to locate the phase line the army should have reached. ‘We’re well behind…’ he said.

  ‘And the Space Marines and Titans are pushing forwards,’ the colonel replied. ‘Word’s just come in that they’ve taken the bridge and are pushing towards the city.’

  ‘Then we have some catching up to do,’ Lucian said. The commanders exchanged surreptitious glances. ‘Well?’ Lucian continued. ‘What’s the problem?’

  Colonel Armak sighed as he replaced his battered cap. He looked around at his subordinates, before answering ‘Morale is the problem, Lord Gerrit.’

  ‘Gurney,’ Lucian said flatly, noting that many of the assembled officers were now looking at their feet, the ground, or anywhere other than their commander. ‘His departure.’

  ‘Yes,’ Armak replied. ‘His sermons bolstered the advance, got it going, kept it going when the enemy counter-attacked…’

  ‘But now he’s gone,’ Lucian finished for the colonel. ‘And without him, the men have lost their spirit.’

  Colonel Armak held Lucian’s gaze for a moment, then nodded. Lucian understood then the colonel’s problem. The Brimlock commander and all of his staff knew that Gurney’s departure had caused the advance to falter and stall, yet they could not bring themselves to say as much. These men were from the same world as Gurney himself, had in all likelihood grown up with his planet-wide sermons. It had been his words of fire and brimstone that had instigated the Damocles Gulf Crusade. He had been the Brimlock regiments’ totem, and they had been his favoured sons and his praetorians. When their home world’s planetary forces had been raised to the Imperial Guard, they had been proud to pledge themselves to his service, and follow him into the xenos-pyres across the Damocles Gulf.

  Now, he had left them.

  Cardinal Gurney’s departure had left behind it a vacuum. A grin split Lucian’s face, for politics, as with nature, deplored a vacuum.

  ‘Then we need to resurrect that spirit, Colonel Armak,’ Lucian said.

  The officer remained blank-faced, his eyes darting around the group to meet the gazes of several of his subordinates. ‘How?’ he said finally.

  ‘Someone needs to speak to the men,’ Lucian said. ‘Whatever it was the cardinal gave them, they need to get it back.’

  The colonel’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who?’ he said.

  Lucian recognised the officer’s disquiet, and trod gently. ‘You?’ Lucian said. ‘A commissar? That’s what they’re trained for…’

  ‘Or you,’ Armak said flatly. ‘Is it command you seek here? You’re known as an ambitious man, Lord Gerrit.’

  Lucian forced himself not to appear too triumphant as he answered, ‘That’s been said, I’ll grant you that. But I know my limits. I have no desire to take over your command, Colonel Armak. And none to preach against the cardinal.’

  ‘Then what do you propose, Lord Gerrit?’

  The scream of a mighty salvo of missiles being fired by the Titans rolled across the land and receded into the distance. Lucian turned towards the battle, marked as it was by a column of black smoke where Erinia Beta burned. He fancied for a moment he saw the dark shapes of Battle Titans moving amongst the dark stain.

  ‘That we follow the example already set us,’ he answered, gesturing with a nod towards the battle. ‘You command, and I’ll lead.’

  Colonel Armak nodded, at first a slight gesture as if he were considering Lucian’s words. Then the motion
became more resolute, and he held his hand out towards Lucian.

  The rogue trader took the proffered hand, and the two men shook on it. ‘Let’s get things moving then,’ Lucian said, casting a glance heavenwards as he imagined Inquisitor Grand’s gnarled hand hovering impatiently over the command rune that would doom them all.

  Brielle held her breath as another tau technician walked past the recess that had become her hiding place. She had infiltrated the communications bay with the intention of disabling its systems so that Aura could not contact the human fleet, but getting in had been the easy part. Carrying out her plan, which in truth she had not entirely thought through, was proving far harder. She glanced back along the service passage, the bay entrance through which she had come now impossibly distant. At ten metre intervals, the passageway’s walls were inset with a recess like the one she was hiding in now providing access to machine systems, and it had taken her far too long to penetrate as far as she had. But now she was committed, for she was nearer to the communications control system than she was to her escape route.

  Not for the first time in the last few months, Brielle questioned her seemingly unerring ability to get herself into the most ridiculous of situations…

  The technician was gone and the passageway was clear again. Brielle peered cautiously along its length. No more crew were in sight, so she carefully eased herself out of the recess, keeping her back to the wall and her eyes on the far end of the communications bay. She darted forwards silently on bare feet, and ducked into the last recess.

  Peering from her hiding place, Brielle confirmed that the communications bay was empty. As she had proceeded along the service corridor she had noted the comings and goings of the tau. It appeared that regular checks were made on the bay’s systems, but it was not permanently attended. Such a location on an Imperial vessel would be staffed by dozens of crewmen, and its systems maintained by even more man-machine servitors, many hard-wired directly into the machinery. The tau utilised what they considered to be highly advanced technologies, reducing the reliance on living and breathing, and fallible, crew. The Imperium warned against the folly of relying too heavily on machine intelligence, many considering it a blasphemy capable of bringing about the doom of the entire human race. Indeed, Brielle had read texts that claimed that such a thing had come about in humanity’s pre-history, texts that ordinary men and women had no access to whatsoever. She shook the apocalyptic visions that text had described from her mind, offering thanks to the God-Emperor of Mankind that the path ahead was clear.

  Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Brielle checked the charge on the compact flamer hidden in the workings of her ring. It read the same as it had the last dozen times she had checked – one shot left. She had not used the weapon in months, not since the deed that had forced her to flee from the crusade into the all-too-ready arms of the tau. She had been cornered by Inquisitor Grand, who had been intent upon probing her mind for signs of the traitorous thoughts he, quite correctly, suspected that she harboured. She had unleashed a blast from the disguised flamer, immolating the inquisitor almost unto death, and fled in the aftermath.

  Judging that the way ahead was clear, Brielle slipped from her hiding place and entered the communications bay. It was a circular area, a good twenty metres in diameter, the ceiling a solid white light source. The circular walls were lined with large screens, across which endless streams of tau text scrolled. The characters meant very little to her, though she had learned a little of the aliens’ script. Five narrow access ways led from points around the wall, and Brielle could see that each led into the bowels of the communication bay’s systems. Picking one at random, she made towards it, then came suddenly to a halt.

  The slightest of movements had caught her eye, and she slipped sideways, ducking into the next access point along. As she sank into the shadows, she watched as a small, disc-shaped drone, floating two metres from the deck, emerged. The tau, Brielle had learned, made extensive use of such machine-intelligent devices, some for basic security tasks, but many more for maintenance and other menial jobs. The heaviest examples carried weapons underslung beneath an armoured disc. Fortunately, this one must have been a maintenance drone, for while it was equipped with a jointed appendage beneath the disc, it carried no obvious weapons.

  The drone floated on its anti-grav field into the centre of the bay and stopped. Its single, red-lit eye blinked slowly as it revolved on the spot, its machine gaze lingering on each of the access points.

  Brielle looked behind her, desperately seeking any implement she could use as a weapon should the need arise. She cursed the tau’s efficiency, for there were no loose objects to hand. As the drone completed its scan of the bay, its lens-eye turned on her, and the blinking turned into a slow pulse.

  She made a fist, ready to activate her concealed flamer, though she was loath to use its last charge. But how else could she defeat the drone if no other weapon was to hand?

  Two million, three hundred thousand kilometres was impossibly far from a safe distance from a planetary body for a vessel to break warp and translate back to real space. Not even the most legendary of Navis Nobilite master Navigators would attempt such an operation, for in all likelihood their vessel would be smeared across interplanetary space, and every soul on board smeared across the depths of the empyrean.

  Nonetheless, at a point in space two million, three hundred thousand kilometres coreward of Dal’yth Prime, a wound was ripped in the flesh of reality. Were it not for the vacuum of space, the gibbering of ravening, hungry monsters and the wailing of every damned soul ever to have lived and died might have echoed from that wound, and driven any mortal that heard it utterly insane.

  Writhing aetheric tentacles quested forth from the wound, some impossible leviathan sensing the lush feeding grounds on the other side of the gate. Then, as by a surgeon pulling tight on the sutures around an incision, the wound was drawn shut, the tentacles, if they were ever really there, slurping back inside.

  The blackness of the void reasserted itself once more. But the starry backdrop of space was somehow darker than before, a patch of stars missing. Stars do not simply go missing, of course, but they can be obscured.

  A black patch of space started moving, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed. Whatever systems propelled the sleek black form, they cast no signature on any spectrum the human race could read, though several older races might have detected them. It angled towards the distant globe that was Dal’yth Prime, and speared silently through space towards its destination, two million, three hundred thousand kilometres away.

  Chapter Eight

  After taking the bridge over River 992, the Space Marine column pushed rapidly through the ruins of the settlement designated Erinia Beta and was soon fighting its way into Gel’bryn proper. Prior to their entry into the city, the Space Marines had fought amongst the low agri-domes and service habs of the small settlements surrounding Gel’bryn. Now, the true character of tau construction revealed itself as the smoke clouds of burning Erinia Beta parted.

  The city was built on a grand scale, yet it was wholly different from the sprawling hives of the Imperium. Gel’bryn had obviously been planned with meticulous precision, its wide thoroughfares and graceful, almost organic structures arrayed according to some grand, unifying scheme. Where humanity’s cities continued to grow for centuries, even millennia, buildings often constructed in layer upon layer of rockcrete sediment, the tau built their cities according to need, and built another when that need was exceeded. It was a process of continuous dynamic expansion, but one that could only lead to confrontation with other races as space and resources dwindled.

  As the Space Marines pressed on, it became evident that their assault had achieved some measure of surprise. Either the tau had not expected the Space Marines to defeat what forces had defended Erinia Beta, or they had fatally misunderstood the crusade’s capabilities and intentions. Much later, Tacticae
savants would postulate that it was the presence of the mighty war machines of the Legio Thanataris that caused the initial disintegration of the tau defence, the sight of the huge god-machines striding along the wide streets striking awe and terror into the defenders’ alien hearts. The Titans, however, did not move as fast or penetrate as far as the Space Marines, for speed was of the essence. Besides this, the central areas of the city were ill-suited to Titan combat, and the Legio was relegated to a support role, for the time being.

  And all the while, Sarik was keeping an eye on the column’s rear, hoping he would see evidence of the Imperial Guard’s armoured units following on in the Space Marines’ wake. So far, there had been none.

  The column passed through the wide-open spaces between rearing structures that resembled gargantuan fungus made of the ubiquitous white resin. The buildings were interconnected by walkways hundreds of metres in the air, along which the Space Marines could make out defenders moving hastily to pre-designated strongpoints.

  The Space Marines smashed aside all opposition, the column becoming the very tip of the spear blade that plunged into the heart of the tau city. The manner of the defence made it clear that the tau had not expected any enemy to ever penetrate so deep. The lead Predators gunned down lone squads of the enemy’s fire warriors. Many were attempting to re-deploy when they were forced to make a desperate last stand, their bodies crushed to pulp beneath the tracks of the Space Marines’ armoured vehicles.

  Individual tau snipers took position on the high walkways, their pinpoint fire striking a number of the Assault Marines from the sky. One Space Marine, the sergeant of the single tactical squad contributed by the Subjugators Chapter, was shot clean through his helmet’s eyepiece while riding in his Rhino’s hatch by a sniper at least two kilometres distant. Even as they had raged against the loss of such a valuable warrior, Sarik and his battle-brothers had saluted the enemy’s obvious skill at arms.